1. Field of the Invention
This invention concerns food holders and more particularly food holders adapted to maintain temperatures of meals including both hot and cold foods at the proper serving temperatures.
2. Description of the Prior Art
The serving of food at locations remote from the point of preparation must meet certain requirements, particularly in the serving of meals in volume. These requirements include the need for maintaining the food temperatures at proper levels, i.e. the entrees, soups, hot beverages, etc., hot and the salads, desserts, cold beverages, etc, cold, in order to preserve the wholesomeness and palatability of the food involved. The food must also be completely enclosed during transport from the preparation site to the serving site for similar health and sanitation as well as aesthetic considerations. These requirements should be fulfilled without involving excessive expenditures of labor or heavy investment in equipment, etc. to keep costs within reason for such cost sensitive institutions as hospitals or commercial enterprises such as hotels.
The presentation of the food should also be in such a mode as to be aesthetically pleasing without the imposition of any annoying or distracting constraint in its comsumption. The food for convalescent or elderly pateints in hospitals or nursing institutions should be readily accessible since such persons may encounter difficulties or have limited capacity for movements in eating of the meal.
All of these requirements have not heretofore been provided by the approaches developed to date, as will be described below.
One traditional approach has been to prepare the food in bulk in a central kitchen and deliver bulk quantities of such food to remote satellite pantries or small kitchens. At these locations the food is kept in temperature maintaining enclosures for serving at relatively nearby locations. While achieving the objective of serving appropriately hot and cold foods, many of the advantages of central preparation are thereby lost, i.e. there is an aggregative increase in wastage involved in numerous satellite locations, greater difficulties in forecasting due to inability to forecast exact requirements at each location, and also there are increases in requirements of equipment, labor and supervision due to losses in efficiency. Finally, the length of time from initial food preparation to consumption is increased by the increased number of handling operations leading to some deterioration in palatability and nutritional value.
Accordingly, the disadvantages of such decentralized kitchen facilities has created a widespread trend towards total centralization. The temperature maintenance associated with such central preparation has been attempted to be solved by various measures.
One of these involves the use of a relatively heavy slug disposed within the food container which when preheated would tend to maintain the temperature of the hot foods. While this approach is partially successful in providing maintenance of hot food temperatures, the initial temperatures to which the relatively low heat capacity slug must be heated are quite high, leading to difficulties in handling, and the temperatures drop relatively rapidly, subjecting the food to deleterious temperature swings. Furthermore, this arrangement makes no provision for maintenance of the temperature of the cold or chilled foods.
Another approach has involved the use of heated and refrigerated carts in which the hot and cold food products were segregated within the cart and the meals assembled at the consumption site. This need for assembling the meal renders the meal serving process more labor intensive and also increases the incidence of improper assemblage of meals due to errors by personnel assigned this task. A refinement of this approach has involved the attempt to segreate such hot and cold food products on a tray which physically straddles a partition located within the cart and divides the hot and cold regions. Use of such equipment has numerous disadvantages, however, i.e. they are rather bulky, heavy, difficult to move, expensive to purchase and maintain, require considerable labor to properly clean and contain numerous nooks and crannies within which insects and other vermin could be harbored.
Another approach has included the utilization of an insulated tray with a bottom molded tray and an upper cover unit that covers most of the bottom tray component. Most typically the top and bottom components consist of a series of cavities aligned one above the other so that when the cover is placed over the bottom tray unit totally encapsulated compartments are formed each specifically designated for the accommodation of a specific food product, depending on the insulating properties of the tray in order to maintain the food temperatures. These units perform reasonably well, particularly when stacked since the configuration of the trays is such that the respective hot and cold food products are segregated vertically together so as to minimize heat transfer between the hot and cold regions. However, the length of time that these food portions can be held at temperature is limited and also require special items of dishware especially designed for the tray configuration, and also impose size constraints on the selection of the portions served. Finally, the configuration of the trays is such that the location of the dishware is constrained such that dishes or other containers are not easily rearranged as the various courses are consumed which can be an annoyance to a fully mobile consumer, and can even impose a hardship on convalescents or geratric patients with limited mobility.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide an arrangement for holding food while it is in transport from a preparation location to a point of consumption, which holder arrangement will maintain both hot and cold food items at their appropriate temperatures for extended periods of time.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide this result without the need for complicated and expensive equipment.
It is a further object to provide such a result which does not require any handling of the food in serving other than simple distribution of assembled trays at the serving point.
It is yet another object of the present invention to provide such an arrangement that does not require the use of specially designed dishware and which allows the person consuming the meal to easily and freely rearrange placement of dishware in the course of the meal.
Another object of the present invention is to provide a heat retaining means which maintains the hot food items at relatively moderate, even temperature levels over an extended period of time.